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General information
Surai, officially Ilosean Surai, more officially Southern Ilosean Surai, endonym Suraayee /s̪ʊˈɾɑːjɛː/, spoken on the provisionally-named desert planet of Ilos by as-of-yet undetermined number of speakers of American and Middle Eastern descent a thousand or so years into the future, is a descendant of American English and the most famous and widely-spoken member of the Suraic family. I am yet to figure out the political and sociolinguistic landscape (spacescape?) of the general area, but so far the Suraic family includes quite a number of other languages, most of which are either minority languages on Ilos and the surrounding planet with a few hundred thousand to a few million mostly-bilingual speakers or unofficial or semi-official languages in other parts of the inhabited space, spoken by descendants of Western New Californian migrants, though the latter have diverged so long ago and are by now so grammatically and lexically different that it might be better to group them into a separate subfamily.
Anyway, to get back to the Surai language in particular, its proper phylo-linguistic tree branch would be:
Indo-European → Germanic → Anglo-Frisian → Anglic → English → American English → Philadelphia English → Central Atlantic Coast City English → New Californian Mountain English → First Wave Suraic → Ilosean Suraic → Southern Ilosean Surai
And if you're wondering what anything after Atlantic Coast City English means, New California is a space colony, first wave refers to the waves of forced displacement of by-then Suraic people and Ilos is the hellhole sandbox that some of them ended up in. Beyond that, I'm afraid I don't have much backstory, but hopefully creating this conlang and its relatives will actually help me with worldbuilding, a la Tolkien.
Notable phonological in-universe features of Surai include heavy lexical and grammatical influence by Modern Standard Arabic, the lingua franca of Western New California, a relative lack of influence from modern GA English, which became an international (interstellar?) prestige language known as Classical English in space, a radically simplified vowel system even by the standards of the mostly /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/ New Californian languages, complete loss of the pharyngealised "emphatic" consonant series of the proto-Suraic without a corresponding increase in the number of vowel phonemes, an abundance of pharyngeal consonants, CV(C)(C) syllable structure with obligatory onsets, mobile weight-sensitive stress and, for something truly unusual, a perception by native speakers of /ʃ/ as being less marked a sibilant than /s/, which is hopefully justified by the diachronica.
Out-of-universe, I deliberately intend Surai to be a subversion of the usual novice conlang fare, that is, it is rather boring phonologically, with no glottalic consonants, no clicks, no ridiculously complex secondary articulation systems a la Northeast Caucasian, no voiceless sonorants, no multiple contrasting plosive series, no vertical or Germanically-overstuffed vowel systems, no interdental sibilants - I don't know if those really are as overused in conlangs as the rumour goes, but I still think I'd rather not include them, if only to stick it to all those Tolkien imitators who want to end every woth with a <th> - and so on and so forth. Surai does have uvulars, /q χ ʁ/, and pharyngeals, /ħ ʕ/, but those, I feel, are justified by heavy historical MSA influence and the in-universe current-day preference of Surai speakers to use Classical Arabic instread of Classical English when they want to sound fancy and educated. Aside from Arabic, Surai phonology has also been inspired by Polish, in terms of how it took a secondary articulation-heavy consonant system and eliminated the entire SA series through diachronic change and also in terms of how most coronals are strongly dental and how postalveolar sibilants are near omnipresent, but I think that this isn't enough of an influence to say that there's any noticeable Slavic-ness in my conlang. If anything, I feel like I have created something unique enough to believably pass for a language that can realsitically arise from the evolution of modern GA English in an environment where its speakers are forced to live side-by-side with Arabs, Kurds, Syrians and the like, though, of course, you're welcome to correct me if I'm wrong.
Phonology
As mentioned, Surai has a rather ordinary, for a Semitic-ish language, phonemic inventory of 27 consonants and 5 vowels.
/m n ŋ/
/p b t̪ t̪s̪ d̪ d̪z̪ k q (ʔ)/
/f v ʋ ʃ s̪ ʒ z̪ χ ʁ h ħ ʕ/
/l ɾ/
/w j/
/i ɛ u ɑ /
/χ ʁ/ tend to be uvular before back vowels and velar before front vowels. Alveolar sibilants are strongly laminal denti-alveolar, while /ʃ ʒ/ are apical postalveolar, although other articulations are attested. /ħ ʕ/ have a variety of different articulations in free variations, most notably /ʡʢ/ for the latter. Glottal stop is analysed at the allophone of null onset. Syllable structure is CV(C)(C), mimicking that of MSA.
Diachronica
As there's no functional timescale yet for my setting, I have decided to separate the process of evolution from modern Philly English into my conlang into a number of indeterminate "steps." The steps are extremely provisional at this point and any advice from people who know more about language evolution than I do is extremely welcome.
Step 1: Philly English to Central Atlantic Coast City English
The beginning point here, I believe, requires no explanation. Modern-day Philadelphia English, with its famous split /æ/-raising system, strong /u/ fronting and rhoticity and a lack of cot-caught merger.
Initial phonology:
/m n ŋ/
/p b t d t͡ʃ d͡ʒ k g/
/f v θ ð s z ʃ ʒ h/
/w ɫ ɻ j/
/ɪ ɛ æ ə ʌ ɜ ɑ ɔ ʊ/
/iɪ ɛɪ eə aɪ ɔɪ aʊ oʊ ʉʊ/
Sound changes:
θ ð → t d
t d → ɾ / intervocalically after stressed vowel
nd ld → n l
ə → ∅
m n ɻ ɫ → m̩ n̩ ɻ̩ ɫ̩ / C_(C#)
ɪ ʊ → ∅/ in the VC_CV or #C_CV position
ɪ → iɪ
ʊ → ʉʊ
aʊ → ɛɔ
oʊ → ɜʊ
ɔ → oə
ɛɪ → eɪ
ɔɪ → oɪ
aɪ → ʌɪ
ɫ → ∅ / (ɜʊ;ɛɔ;ʉʊ)_
(ɔ;ʊ;oə)ɫ → ʉʊ
ɛɫ → ɛɔ
ɫ → w / _C, unless syllabic
Final phonology:
/m m̩ n n̩ ŋ/
/p b t d t͡ʃ d͡ʒ k g/
/f v s z ʃ ʒ h/
/w ɫ ɫ̩ ɻ ɻ̩ ɾ j/
/ɛ æ ʌ ɜ ɑ/
/iɪ eɪ eə ʌɪ oɪ oə ɛɔ ɜʊ ʉʊ/
The end result of this is still more or less Philadelphia English, but without dental fricatives, with a phonemic tapped rhotic that now contrasts with /t d/ where said dental fricatives used to be and a slightly different vowel system. In addition to the ongoing vowel shifts of the modern Philly English, lax high vowels are lost in the VC_CV and #C_CV environment, schwas are persistently lost everywhere, which results in proliferation of syllabic sonorants, not that it’s impossible to already analyse GA English as full of them, and the surviving /ɪ ʊ/ diphthongise to produce what GA considers to be tense high vowels. In terms of consonants, /ld/ and /nd/ simplify to /l/ and /n/, respectively, and /l/ in coda gets either absorbed into the previous vowel if the vowel is back or has a back component or simply vocalises to /w/.
Step 2: CACC English to New Californian English
Initial phonology:
/m m̩ n n̩ ŋ/
/p b t d t͡ʃ d͡ʒ k g/
/f v s z ʃ ʒ h/
/w ɫ ɻ ɻ̩ ɾ j/
/ɛ æ ʌ ɜ ɑ/
/iɪ eɪ eə ʌɪ oɪ ɔə ɛɔ ɜʊ ʉʊ/
Sound changes:
Vɪ̯w → Vjʉ
ɔə → o
ɛ → e
æ eə → ɛ
ɑ → ɔ
ʌ → a
ɜ → ɛ
iɪ → i
ʉʊ → ʉ
ɜʊ → ɛʊ
mp nt ntʃ ŋk → mb nd ndʒ ŋg → b d dʒ g→ p t tʃ k → f s ʃ x / in onset
b d dʒ g → p t tʃ k / in coda
t → ∅ / _n̩
Vɻ → ɻV / word-finally
Final phonology:
/m m̩ n n̩ ŋ/
/p b t d t͡ʃ d͡ʒ k g/
/f v s z ʃ ʒ h/
/w ɫ ɻ ɻ̩ ɾ j/
/i e ɛ a ɔ o ʉ/
/eɪ ʌɪ oɪ ɛɔ ɛʊ/
The transition from CACC English to New Californian Mountain English is notorious for the so-called “New Californian chain shift,” where fortis plosives in onset spirantised and the resulting gap “dragged” lenis plosives into becoming voiceless, nasal+lenis plosive clusters into simplifying into voiced plosives and fortis consonants after nasals into voicing. This also completely dismantled the complicated fortis-lenis distinction found in modern GA English plosives and replaced it with a relatively straightforward voiced-voiceless distinction. In codas, the changes have been much less drastic, with the fortis-lenis distinction simply being abandoned and the two plosive series merging into simple voiceless stops with no glottal stop shenanigans, the length of the preceding vowels was likewise quickly homogenised and failed to become phonemic, which resulted in the complete merger of minimal pairs such as pig and pick. These two sound changes were more or less the reason why New Californian was considered a separate language even while it was mutually intelligible with its contemporary sister English descendants, as it was very noticeably different from the general norm of the surrounding linguistic area (of space?) - to either debuccalise the fortis plosives in coda to glottal stops or merge them with the lenis ones but preserve the extra vowel length before the former lenis series. The vowel system’s evolution was characterised by the smoothing over of diphthongs to create a triangular seven-vowel monophthong system, something very prevalent in the New Californian sprachbund.
I’ll stop today’s post here to ask for advice - as you can see, the main problem of my diachronica so far is the relative lack of conditional sound changes, and I would like somebody to throw me a bone here and just point me in the general direction of what conditional sound changes can I go for here.
Last edited by Knit Tie on Mon Mar 26, 2018 6:34 am, edited 5 times in total.
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